Friends,

This speech from our Illinois Governor, JB Pritzker came on my car radio recently while I was driving. Realizing that he was saying something of significance not only to Illinois citizens but to the rest of the country, I parked the car on a side street to listen with greater attention. I found his well crafted speech delivered with a sense of urgency and conviction and had a message for the whole country. I place it here inviting you to take time to hear it and to read some of it here. I hasten to add that it holds a message that is about right and wrong, good and evil, survival and not surviving. Please take the time to consider and act on his words however you may choose to do so. 

May our country survive the forces that assault us.

— Joseph Kilikevice
Shem Center Director Emeritus

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February 19, 2025

Thanks are due to Rachel Maddow who, in opening her show last night, showed clips from Illinois governor JB Pritzker’s state of the state speech yesterday.

I reproduce here the closing of his speech which feels to me to be a profound and unvarnished reading of the “signs of our times.” Listen to his closing here or read it below.

Governor Pritzker is Jewish and he began this way:

I do not invoke the specter of Pritzker invokes specter of Nazi Germany lightly. But I know the history intimately—and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned — the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed — a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

Distrust, hate and blame have certainly characterized our politics in America of late. January 6, 2020 will never be erased from our memories—nor should it.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

Someone to blame. Resentment has been baked into MAGA politics for a long time. It sizzles on every page of Project 2025.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac — and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks — arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too ‘female’ and ‘nonwhite.’ The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I have just one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities — once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends — after that, when the problems we stared with are still there staring us in the face — what comes next?

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history — then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it….

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible….My oath is to the constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America—and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one.

That very day Trump called himself a “king” and the White House distributed a picture of him in kingly attire. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions—but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazi one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Here he relays the story of Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978. Twenty showed up, but 2000 people came to protest and resist them. The march fizzled in ten minutes. It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Thank you.